


Sonata

by Buttons15



Category: Overwatch (Video Game)
Genre: F/F
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-04-30
Updated: 2018-04-30
Packaged: 2019-04-30 01:57:13
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,475
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14486301
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Buttons15/pseuds/Buttons15
Summary: Sombra has a guitar. Angela doesn't know how to play, but that never stopped her from trying.





	Sonata

When Sombra walked out of the shower and into her room, still rubbing her hair dry with a towel, she did not expect to see Angela already awake – the doctor had been up most of the night working on something or the other, and it was only half past nine.

Yet up Angela was, sideways to her, doing the one thing Sombra least expected her to – she’d picked up Sombra’s guitar from the corner of the room and was casually messing around with it, eyes closed. 

The instrument was old, a gift from Gabriel, older even than her strange relationship with the other. Sombra could play, just a little and just simple songs, and she’d picked up girls more often than she’d picked up the guitar. Mostly because she used the guitar  _ precisely _ to pick up girls.

Sombra moved to her closet, took a shirt and some shorts and tossed the towel on the floor, right next to the day before’s clothes. Angela would call her a slob at some point – she always did. She wondered then when exactly this – this  _ thing _ between them – had become routine to a point she could predict the other’s actions.

Not that she wanted to end it. But lately Sombra had caught herself with the dangerous thought that perhaps she wanted something else – something  _ more _ . Their relationship was like whatever sounds Angela was forcing out of the guitar – chaotic, without tune or synchrony or any sort of logic behind it. A cacophony of nights badly slept and feelings that just refused to stay hidden.

It would never work out to be anything other than what it was. She knew it.  _ They _ knew it. They had been together that night because occasion allowed it, although Sombra gave luck little pushes so that their paths would cross more often than she would admit. But the tension was always there – the knowledge that the two were at opposite sides of what was essentially a war, even though when it came right down to it they were both just using their contractors as means to an end.

Her _heart._ It hurt. Sombra longed for a bottle of tequila and _Tío Gabí_ to hear her whines.

Angela opened her eyes, turned to her. Sombra cleared her throat. “Don’t mind me.”

Angela didn’t answer, instead turning her attention back to the guitar. Sombra got dressed.

“I didn’t know you play.” 

“Mmm. I don’t. Not the guitar, anyway.” Her fingers danced over the strings and tugged them one by one, like a harp. “I used to play the piano. Back before… you know.” She trailed off and didn’t continue.

Sombra knew. Angela played the guitar, not so randomly anymore. Slowly but surely she built up a pattern –  _ do, re, mi, fa  _ – and Sombra sat down on her bedside, thinking about everything and nothing in particular. The Interface booted up inside her brain, and daily news flashed over her contacts. 

She read them without paying a lot of attention. 

_ > New strike by rebel faction Null Sector leaves 10 dead and many wounded – _

_ > Axiom to release new, improved prosthetic model line – _

_ Sol, la, si, do _ , Sombra thought, counting the notes in her head as she read.

_ > Guadalajara beats Pachuca 2x1 in incredible choke. Click to watch – _

_ > Vishkar to take over development of Latin American areas ravaged by the omnic crisis – _

_ > Violence peaks in the small city of Dorado after Los Muertos gang leader found dead – _

The last one caught her attention, and she quickly scanned it. Her activities with Los Muertos were in the past – she’d long moved on to bigger fish – yet her influence there was enough that this issue, at least, she would be able to solve. She needed no more than a single call to turn one of the equally incompetent ring leaders into a commander, and that would give the population peace until the one she chose – Carlos or Juan or Marco or whomever – bit a bullet and she’d have to do it again.

_ Do, re, mi, fa.  _ Sombra herself was the one to last the longest running the gang, and many recalled her time as leader as one of the most prosperous of Dorado. She remembered as if it were the day before, the way she stood amongst other gang members her age – they were  _ kids _ , damn it – and she told them what to do and what to not do.

_ “Se quieres bailar _ ,” she used to say,  _ “Mantente fuera del camino de los poderosos.”  _

_ Sol, la, si, do.  _ If they wanted to dance, they should stay out of the way of the powerful. And dance they did, every weekend, twice, as cash flowed in from the market of weapons and drugs and the illegal sale of savaged omnic parts – something akin to organ trafficking, she gathered, but Sombra could never bring herself to care.

She left eventually, left to chase her endless conspiracy. But days like these, when she stopped to read the news from home, she saw nothing had really changed. 

She suddenly felt exhausted. She was tired of the squabbles of the powerful, of wars that left nothing but misery and orphans in their wake - orphans like her. And Angela. Like her tune –  _ do, re, mi, fa, sol, la, si _ , and back to  _ do  _ again. Over and over. Things she could never change, because for as many bullets she put through skulls, what she truly fought against was human nature itself.

Yet whatever Angela was playing was something else now. Music – slow and sad, notes played sometimes with awkward uncertainty, but music regardless. 

Sombra froze in place and tilted her head, watching, taking the chance to enjoy something she could count on one hand how many times she’d seen – a rare moment in which Angela’s features were not marked by stress. Instead the tension had rolled out of her shoulders, and Sombra appreciated how her hair, loose, fell on them, catching sunlight that made it look like liquid gold. 

She took in Angela’s shape, the whole of her, her curves and the way her fingers plucked notes out of the guitar with the same ease they tugged on her heartstrings, felt something on her chest squeeze a little at the way the other’s lips were quirked in a light smile –

“Your gay is showing,” Angela teased, blue eyes slightly open, giving her a sideways glance. Sombra felt heat on her cheeks and turned away.

_ Like a goddamn teenager. _

“ _ Pendeja _ ,” she mumbled. Angela was wearing nothing but a large shirt Sombra had snatched from Gabriel solely because she knew the other liked sleeping on large shirts. Sombra tried to recognize the tune, but it was  _ incredibly hard _ to focus. “I thought you didn’t play.”

“No, but I used to play the piano. I know the notes. I hear the notes.” She resumed the music. “I play the notes.”

_ A fucking genius, _ Sombra mused, caught by surprise by that realization. She knew that, of course – she knew the woman she’d been sleeping with was among the brightest minds in the planet, her own included, one of the few people Sombra would actually fear to cross. But it was easy to overlook the little ways that would manifest.

Angela was a handyman, and Sombra could never forget the look on her face when she was caught cooking pasta on the coffee machine, because she’d run out of gas.  _ Pathetic _ , yes, but also so ingenuous it brought a smile to Sombra’s face every time she thought of it.

_ (And she’d never replicated the method. Absolutely not.) _

Sombra’s apartment, the one in Venice where they met most often, was filled with what she had begun to mentally refer as Incredible Household Repairs by Angela the Orthopedist. When her kitchen mixer broke, Angela replaced it with a pair of scissors taped to a power drill. When Gabriel took away her clothes’ iron, Angela wrapped a hot pan in tinfoil and straightened her clothes up with that. When she broke the last of her plates – and she never owned more than two – Angela made a bowl from an empty milk bottle. 

Her doorknob was a bike pedal. Her soap dish was a plastic cup with holes at the bottom. When it was hot, Angela improvised an air conditioning device with a fan, a Styrofoam box and soda bottles filled with ice.  She loved fixing things, Sombra had noticed, perhaps as much as she loved fixing  _ people _ .

Sombra refused to buy functional appliances even though she could afford to, solely because she loved Angela’s fix-ups so much, and she loved the look of reproach and hidden pride the other got whenever she saw that yes, Sombra still filled the washing machine with ice and used it to refrigerate beers – it was a good idea, damn it.

_ It’s the moonlight sonata, _ she realized. 

“A remarkably sad song. Interesting that you chose that one to learn as a kid,” she commented.

Angela missed a note. “Mm. I learned this one after. I still play sometimes. I have a hard-light portable piano that is easy to carry around. Just… hardly find the time to.”

She hid the melancholy notably well, but Sombra was sharp and empathic and she knew her a bit more than Angela would like.

_ You can fix so many people, yet you can’t fix yourself, _ she thought. Angela was not perfect, far from it – she was arrogant and distant and snappy, and she had emotional walls as tall and guarded as the walls in Tijuana. Had Sombra met Angela in another moment of her life, she might have hated her. But she wasn’t the girl in Los Muertos anymore. 

_ Would you still be here if you knew all I’ve done? The people I’ve hurt? _

Sombra had done bad things – cruel things, even. She had made an example out of far too many people to ever call herself a good person. She’d blackmailed, she’d hurt, she’d lied and stolen and killed without regret. She found the men who’d hurt her, and she tied them up and put them inside piles of tires and then she set them on fire. She still had the crystal-clear memory of the screams and the  _ smell _ and the horrified faces of the recruits who had seen it. 

That had felt good, back then. For the longest while, she followed the Machiavellian principle of being feared over being loved. But right then, seeing Angela toying with sounds, seeing her curious yet determined stance as she tried to hit a note, Sombra sort of wanted to be loved instead. 

She wanted to be a better person now – a  _ good _ person. For her. Because somehow, for some reason, Angela kept coming back to her too and if - god forbid - should her love Sombra back, then Sombra would want to be someone good, even if it was all ultimately pretending. A truly good person, she was certain, would let the doctor go. 

But Sombra was a selfish person, and she wanted her to stay.

_ Did you fix me, Ziegler? Did you stitch me up with tape and wire into something that is functional and clever yet so much less than you deserve? _

She ached to wipe that hint of melancholy away with a kiss. She ached for her smile. Sombra stood, crossed her arms and watched her play. She felt like a kid again, in those rare peaceful days between the bombings, in which she told herself that yes, this time, the war would be over for good and no more missiles would come. 

But she knew more than anyone that the war had never ended.

Sombra took an abrupt step forward, then another, closing the distance between them. Then she knelt, cupped Angela’s face with her hands and kissed her, long and hard. She felt guilt. She had, at long last, found what she was looking for – the one person that maybe, just maybe, with the right support and resources could  _ fix the world. _

And now she wanted to keep her. 

“You’re blocking the sun,” Angela smiled against her lips. “I was doing photosynthesis.”

“What?”  Sombra pulled away and frowned.

_ > Photosynthesis: a process used by plants and other organisms to convert light energy into chemical energy that can later be released to fuel the organisms' activities (energy transformation). _

_ < I know what fucking photosynthesis is _ , she snapped at her Interface.

“Haven’t you heard? It’s the latest innovation by Winston and I. It’s very energy efficient. I should be turning green anytime soon.”

Sombra searched her face for any hint of a tease, but Angela was notably hard to read. “ _ Puta _ , if I think Widowmaker is hot even though she is blue, I’m sure I can handle you being green.”

Angela rolled her eyes. “That was a joke.”

“You’re in a good mood today,” she ran her hands through fine blonde hair. “Are Morrison and Amari off duty again?”

“For the entire month,” she grinned. “No deadlines, no pointless paperwork, just me and my science and free time at long last. Just think about how much  _ sex _ I’m going to have!”

A proposition Sombra would usually jump at, but this time it made her stomach turn. She wanted something else.

“I love you,” she said on an impulse, and then wished she could eat her words back. 

Angela flinched and pulled away, the usual clinical coldness returning to her gaze. For an incredibly tense moment there was silence between them, and Sombra was absolutely sure she’d ruined everything. 

“… I know.” 

“I – I. What’s that supposed to – mff.”

The kiss was rough this time. Angela bit and dug her nails on Sombra’s shoulders. Sombra did not complain.

“What’s your name?”

“My… name?”

“I don’t know your name. You know everything there is to know about me and I don’t… know your name.” Their lips met again, and Angela whispered, “I don’t even know what name to call in bed.”

“I…” Sombra pulled away.  _ Have feelings. Am anxious. Would appreciate a direct response to them. Don’t want to be just a piece of meat right now, even though I usually don’t mind. _ “It’s Olivia,” she gave in.

Angela’s eyes widened, as if she hadn’t really been expecting a reply. “I… see. Well.”

Silence again. Angela looked as if she was physically struggling with words. Sombra tried to be patient, but it was eating her away. She fidgeted.

“It’s… nice to meet you, Olivia,” she said at last, and then kissed her again, gently this time. When they broke apart, Angela didn’t make eye contact. “I think I can play another song. Maybe. I could try.”

“Something happier this time,” Sombra suggested, tentatively moving closer so that their sides touched.

Angela relaxed just a little. “Ode to Joy,” she gave a tight smile. “I could probably play that one on a digeridoo.”

Sombra closed her eyes, and listened, and let herself believe again.

**Author's Note:**

> there was no plot to this really I just felt like writing fluff 
> 
> sue me


End file.
